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Fark Creator Slams 'the Wisdom of Crowds'
GovTechGuy writes with some harsh words from Fark.com founder Drew Curtis, speaking at a conference Tuesday in Washington, DC: "'The "wisdom of the crowds" is the most ridiculous statement I've heard in my life. Crowds are dumb,' Curtis said. 'It takes people to move crowds in the right direction, crowds by themselves just stand around and mutter.' Curtis pointed to his own experience moderating comments on Fark, which allows users to give their often humorous take on the news of the day. He said only one percent of Web comments have any value and called the rest 'garbage.' Another example Curtis pointed to is the America Speaking Out website recently launched by House Republicans to allow the public to weigh in on the issues and vote for policy positions they support. Curtis called the site an 'absolute train wreck.' 'It's an absolute disaster. It's impossible to tell who was kidding and who wasn't,' Curtis said."
Wow. I hear a best selling demotivator poster in the works.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
I have never frequented fark.com, only clicking through on occasion the last X? number of years it's been running, but TFS makes me appreciate the founder's own wisdom....
GENERATION O98346: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig and remove a random number from the generation. T
He said only one percent of Web comments have any value and called the rest 'garbage.'
Funny, that also seems to be the case with most articles. Garbage in, garbage out.
Fark Creator Anoints Self Emperor, Declares Martial Law
Dog is my co-pilot.
Read "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" by Charles Mackay (first published in 1841). His book discusses Tulip-mania in the Netherlands and witch persecutions (and many more incidents) to illustrate the distinct LACK of wisdom of crowds.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Keep in mind that Drew is running Fark as a business, and certain comments that might rail against his corporate superiors will get modded or banned. Drew and his modmins are know to ban people based on petty rivalries and personality conflicts. Fark is no bastion of "free speech", and what would he know about "wisdom" from a site that is dedicated to goofball headlines and accelerated political trolling.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
Is like resistance in a parallel circuit.
Come on. "America Speaking Out" is not about getting wisdom from people, any more than the White House's solicitation of ideas for the oil spill was. It's about allowing people to feel like they have a voice. Don't spoil the illusion!
As to the "wisdom of crowds" in general, it depends entirely on the context. We know for a fact that when crowds have significant enough motivation (like money), they do an excellent job of predicting things, for example. But if your motivation is to have people point at your comment and emote somehow (laugh, get angry, friend you, whatever), then obviously, truth and wisdom are not your goals, so you don't often find truth and wisdom there.
..is he, like, new to the Internet?
Slashdot is not so different, there are some pretty useless comment here. Hell, I make a lot of them on occasion myself.
But if you read between the lines and "cherry pick", there are usually hidden gems about a software package, a piece of advice or something truly fascinating.
The noise to signal ratio is what matters, and on Slashdot it is better some days than others but in general it's a lot better than a lot of other sites. Some sites like YouTube or even to some extent Digg have almost no added value in their comments and the "noise" is pretty high.
It's not just about the freshest content (which is why I think a lot of people frequent Digg or Hacker News), the comments are what makes a user-generated-content site work... at least for me.
That's why I keep coming back here.
If you can't mod them join them.
I run a site that targets the same demographic as Curtis and while I concur that the vast majority of posts provide little value, there are a subset that are well reasoned and very helpful.
Any crowd is going to eventually devolve into a set of leaders and a set of followers and I think the problem that we see online is that the leaders are often not the most informed, but the most controversial.
However, i'm not sure that's much different from anywhere in the real world
Perhaps less that "wisdom of the crowds" are dumb, but more that the vocal minority tend to drown out the quieter majority ... and the percentage of nutcases is much higher in the former group.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/plus2sd/200809/the-stupidity-crowds
"What can you do? I gained some insight into this problem several years ago when my research group performed an fMRI study of social conformity. We recreated a version of the famous Asch experiment of the 1950s and used fMRI to determine how a group changes an individual's perception of the world. Two things emerged from the study. First, when individuals conform to a group's opinion, even when the group is wrong, we observe changes in perceptual circuits in the brain, suggesting that groups change the way we see the world. Second, when an individual stands up against the group, we observed strong activation in the amygdala, a structure closely associated with fear. All this tells me that not only are our brains not wired for truly independent thought, but it takes a huge amount of effort to overcome the fear of standing up for one's own beliefs and speaking out".
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
America Speaking Out is not, arguably, the best example.
Only the nuttiest of cyber-utopians would suggest that the "wisdom of crowds" holds up particularly well when part of the crowd is engaged in deliberate sabotage. Worse; because of the, er... exceptional quality of political discourse in America, you ran into the "Poe's Law" problem.
If your mods are remotely on the ball, or your wiki editors are up to snuff, or whatever, it is pretty trivial to resist obvious and unsubtle attacks. Worthless posts get modded down, somebody spends 20 minutes sprinkling obscenities into a wiki article and somebody else spends 20 seconds reverting it, those sorts of attacks are survivable enough. If, though, a fair part of your "crowd" is utterly batshit crazy, you run into a real problem: your most committed users will produce output almost exactly like your most vicious, cynical parodists(the same thing happened to Conservapedia. Because the true believers and the mocking liberal cynics were indistinguishable, the site got bogged down in a series of purges based almost entirely on personality and loyalty to Dear Leader, rather than actual helpfulness to the "crowd"; because it simply wasn't possible to tell the "crowd" and any but its stupidest enemies apart).
Similarly, with America Speaking Out, the problem isn't going to be with trivial vandalism, which is annoying but quick to clean up, the problem will be that it is impossible to distinguish between people ranting about how Barrack Hussein is a communist fascist muslim sleeper agent because they believe that, and the ones doing exactly the same thing because it amuses them to associate such views with the RNC. Conversation is doomed when signal and noise can be distinguished only by intent.
http://www.fark.com/cgi/comments.pl?IDLink=5457221&cpp=1
Yeah because democrats are better?
Lets just say that both major parties have an underlying sameness that prevents any progress other than over tiny issues.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Posting boobies and weenies links does not ipso facto mean a person is stupid.
You should also cite some of these "people with letters after their names". I can cite one Bryan Caplan, Ph.D. In his book The Myth of the Rational Voter, he argues that, even if a crowd is 99% stupid (he uses the term ignorant), it can make wise decisions. How? Because those 99% of idiots choose rather randomly, canceling each other out, and the remaining 1% choose "properly".
This is assailable, of course, but it's rather myopic of you to pretend that your view is unquestionably correct. Rather than attacking the person (Curtis, in this case), attack the idea.
I've always felt the rest of the world was stupider than me, too. Of course, in my case, I'm obviously smarter than this Fark creator.
Qxe4
It was noted in the original paper that the wisdom of crowds applies when comprised of aggregate decisions of individuals making decisions as individuals. On most websites this is not what you get.
Drew goes so far as to imply (by my reading) that crowds act more stupidly than individuals. These crowd failures are identified and discussed even on the Wiki page, most notably relevant to Fark.com and Americans Speaking Out:
Due to the nature of the websites various factors come into play which ruin contra to requirements for "the wisdom of crowds". Not forgetting that if it's on the internet, it's probably not being taken seriously and therefore is hardly a gauge of anything.
(I'm not wanting to be seen as endorsing the "wisdom of crowds", I'll take the wisdom of a few experts instead thank you very much, but the argument presented here is extremely flawed).
I suspect that the anonymity granted by a mere handle online gives many people license to compete for "points" on any ground that can get a laugh or comparable reaction from their online peers. The few who may have actually something to contribute to society will either find their attempts drowned out by that crowd, or won't bother to frequent Fark towards that end.
By comparison, I find that Slashdot's peer-based moderation system fares quite well in filtering the noise. It's not perfect, but the Slashdot crowd seems also a good bit less driven to cash in on quick, cheap thrills.
On the whole, though, I trust far more in the thoughtfully conducted discourse of the considerate few, than the multidirectional pull of large crowds. I wonder if that says something, too, about the effectiveness of our democracy.
--Udo.
One of the main things that one might say about the crowd is that it leads to groupthink, in which false statements are allowed to be pushed as true because no one has the ethical or moral ability to deny them as true. No matter one's political persuasion, one cannot say this of America Speaking Out. On the healthcare page, the listing show that people are overwhelming against limiting abortions, though not so much for the absolute legalization of abortion. This shows that people are thinking for themselves. The idea to make english the official language is also way down. When I first say the site I thought it would be a joke, but it has been kind of interesting to review. One of the first ideas to make it to the top was the taxing of churches.
I think if we did do what the people wanted, the crowd, we might be ok. The problem is that what the people wants tend to be a weighted average in which the amount of money one has plays a significant role. This is not necessarily bad, but if we want to do what the people want, then it should be all people, not just the rich. Look at the oil spill. It was said that we all want cheap oil at any cost, but it turns out people want fresh seafood as well. People make more money off oil, so that is priority of the rich. The common person though likes affordable food as well.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Both sides of are equally stupid. When you go Far RIght you are hindering all progress. If you go to the far Left you are trying to fix things that doesn't need to be fixed, or with solutions that just makes them worse.
When you open the gates for public opinion you are going to get the Crazies from both sides. And because they feel so insanely strong about their opinion they will be the most vocal... Drowning out the ideas of the more sane people.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I hadn't heard that site mentioned in years.
If Politico or the New Republic or the Huffington Post said that, they might have a point. Any anonymous site is going to have low-quality comments.
http://xkcd.com/756/ Mildly related to the summary (the secret hovering remark from this particular comic): "News networks giving a greater voice to viewers because the social web is so popular are like a chef on the Titanic who, seeing the looming iceberg and fleeing customers, figures ice is the future and starts making snow cones."
So what are the major difference between the two parties?
The democrats want a -bit- more government, and are totally willing to enforce the parts of the constitution they like, namely the right to free speech (so long as you aren't promoting "hate" crimes, can't have true freedom now can we?). The republicans want a -bit- less government, and are totally willing to enforce the second amendment but forget any right to privacy (look at the PATRIOT Act), etc.
Ok, so you might get different views on abortion, welfare, etc. but forget any real debate over hard money, real tax reform, elimination of various government programs, etc.
They are two sides to the same coin and any differences serve to cloud the main issue of sameness.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
How About "The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nation" It is a nice counter to Charles Mackay. It's funny how people like to say crowds are morons and then try to prove it Scientifically like Francis Galton did with his Ox Experiment. If a crowd is so stupid why is the Mean of Francis' experiment within 1 pound of the weight of the Ox? From what Fark is ranting about he seems more irked about his crowd not self organizing when he wants it to. Wikipedia and Youtube self organize not just because of leadership but because the crowd wants to organize. If you have a meaningless concept that doesn't have the interest of the crowd then it wont self organize. And just because a group of people can be tricked like in the many witch burnings doesn't mean they have more or less wisdom then the individual since I've seen individuals go far more mad than that.
the problem is, his feelings lead one to think this dangerous thought: "99% of the crowd is dumb... therefore, we need some more trustworthy entity for wisdom"
when you say that, you've committed a worse stupidity than the aggregate stupidity of the crowd
what he says is essentially true, the crowd is stupid in aggregate. getting wisdom from the crowd is a process of gleaning the nuggets from the bullshit. the problem comes when the process of separating the wheat from the chaff gets so tedious that you wish there were a shortcut, that you wish there were some special class of people who are better than the average man, and trust them for wisdom instead. which is a FAR more dangerous thought than simply recognizing the plainly obvious stupidity of crowds. there's no shortcuts: placing your trust in some sort of clique or aristocratic division is when the REAL trouble starts
so yes, people are dumb. but yet it is even dumber to trust some small segment of people according to some ill-defined parameters of what wisdom is instead
i think drew has just been modding too much. if i were a proctologist, i would be sick of looking at assholes too. if i were modding comments all day, and i was constantly exposing myself to the kind of mental diarrhea you see when browsing slashdot at -1, then i would hate people and crowds as well
i think reading the shallow end of the comment pool constantly will turn you into a misanthrope, a hater of mankind
limit your exposure to the idiot area of comment boards, or it will give you brain damage
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It is too bad Drew finds it difficult to detect {sarcasm, parody, irony, ...} without some lame ASCII-art version of a laugh track tacked on. Being dull and slow must be quite terrible, but recognizing your limitations must help somewhat. At many points in time you can look at democratic choice as being awful; pretty much every country can point to repeated elections of imbeciles and thugs. Overall, though, democracy has done a pretty good job of filtering out the wannabe Caesars, Napoleons and their ilk. Ron Paul, I'm talking about you.
While democracy ( or crowds ) don't seem to offer much in star appeal, there is a long term stability in mass decisions which are likely more right than wrong.
In contrast, dictatorships, monarchies and brilliant individuals don't really pan out in the long term, other than how their gross failures help foster new democracies.
This is not a new concept. David W. Moore discusses something very similar in his book, The Opinion Makers
Basically, Moore argues that the purpose of polling is to measure the opinions of those who have considered an issue, not to measure 'top of mind' opinions.
One of the most interesting examples discussed in the book was a poll done leading up to the invasion of Iraq. The poll asked respondents if they felt the U.S. Government should invade Iraq, then depending on how the respondent answered, the pollster followed up with a second question that basically asked if the respondent would be disappointed if the Government performed the opposite action. I don't recall the exact breakdown, but basically if you evaluated only the first question, it appeared that around 60% of those polled wanted us to invade Iraq, but after evaluating the second question, only 28% desired us to go to war and 30% desired us not to go to war. A plurality were indifferent to the actions of the Government.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
How is this article's claim any different than the criticism that Obama's "oil spill" speech was too intellectual for most US citizens, because it was written at a 10th grade level? There's a reason that Homer Simpson is the US Everyman.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
problem is they aren't choosing randomly. They're choosing the person they think is most like themselves. So the stupid population will vote for someone stupid.
The best system is adversarial but friendly: liberals arguing for each change that sounded good, conservatives challenging each proposal demanding evidence that it actually is good, but both agreed that the goal is to make the country better. We pretty mich have none of that; it's all meme-parroting and visciousness and stealing from our grandchildren.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
At least you aren't shadowbanned.
No single person could ever believe the idea that god had a head of an elephant or jackal, or that god created woman from man's rib. But somehow, when a billion people believe it, it's easier to fall in line.
I worked within the Democratic party during the last presidential election.
During one part we had some where close to 500 issue reports which needed to be reviewed to determine whether it should be voted on or dropped. Issues were health care, internet, data security, energy, open source software....
Most of these reports contained nothing more than opinion. I reviewed a report that was interesting on energy distribution close to 100 pages, which had been presented in a 25 page slideshow. Some of the ideas were very interesting and compelling, but nothing was documented. Where did you find this number? How did you arrive at this figure?..... There was nothing to verify that any of these numbers were anything but random numbers. But most there took it as gospel. I asked for supporting documentation and was given copies of more papers by the same author or other papers which had nothing showing that they weren't pure gibberish.
I think I went through about 50 of these. Pretty much all were the same.
The best document out of all that I saw was something on 'George Bush should be charged for criminal activities' it was well documented with instances of supposed malfeasance and had references to supporting legal documents and laws. The presentation wasn't really bad either, but it just wasn't going to go anywhere with regards to the Democratic platform. If it wasn't so controversial, I would have asked that further documents put forward had at least 10% of the documentation and references before they were to be considered.
But basically after that I have not put any serious effort into the Democratic party, because I saw they had a number of major issues within the organization. By and large after putting out a lot of effort, I felt the whole process wasn't geared around influencing change within the goverment , but more so to make people feel they had a voice.
Do people often associate the word 'wisdom' along with the word 'Fark'? From HIS point of view, I'm sure he's absolutely correct. Depends on the crowd, though. If you go to a TED conference, the crowd is going to be substantially more wise than the crowd on Fark.
It also depends on the subject. Religion and politics can overwhelm even the most wise person. (see also: the 'Conservative Right' in the U.S.)
I understood that the difference between wise crowds and stupid mobs is the processes of selection of good results that have become feasible with modern technologies.
For example, asking random people is not the best way to know about encyclopedic subjects. Wikipedia works because it has crowds and a process (easy edition, easy correction, talk pages, contributions history,...) that preserves good contributions and rejects bad ones.
Same about the Linux kernel, Torvalds' role filters good and bad contributions.
In Slashdot, we have moderation that allows me to read the cream of the comments avoiding hundreds of trolls, redundant comments and not very enlightened sentences.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Actually, if that were the case, we'd at least average out to somebody reasonably competent who represents the average view of the public as a whole. That's a heck of lot better than what we usually get.
Generally speaking, voters vote for the person who shouts the loudest/most frequently/most recently. The result is that the person with the most money wins, which in general is the person least like the people voting. If the two candidates shout equally loudly, frequently, and recently, then voters vote for the person who does the best job of telling them that he or she is the most like they are, which is almost never a person who actually resembles them.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Even if 99% of all comments are garbage, that is simply an argument for better filtering, not that the crowd has no wisdom. The whole point of the wisdom of the crowd in the first place was to apply filtering mechanisms to ensure the best gets to the top. It seems to work well for Wikipedia and it even will work for this comment if you mod me +1.
The reason 99% of comments are garbage is the motivation behind the comments, a well though out insightful comment may take too much effort for the little gain (many intelligent comments simply get passed over), while a witty comment or troll that does nothing to advance the discussion takes much less effort and has more gain.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
And yet, Drew Curtis was smart enough to make a very good living off of said Boobies and Weenies links.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Oh I love Libertarians. It is like 5 year olds arguing about why they should have chips & soda. Good on ya, and I'm pretty sure "mevets" has been called far worse things by far better people; to steal a phrase.
This would be fine, except for one thing. The idiots are sheep. They don't vote randomly, they follow the the leader. Sure they leader may be an intelligent/benevolent* influence, but even so, this doesn't change the fact the the crowd are still stupid.
*In my experience this is rairly the case. Rather, the crowd tend to follow the the loudest bigot who affirms their prejudices.
*runs*
He's clearly missing the point behind the concept, but I can't tell if he's doing it on purpose to try to make a joke out of it, or if he simply doesn't understand the term. Since this is the internet, and it's traditional, I'll respond under the assumption that all his comments were intended to be taken at literal face value.
The idea is that the crowd, as a whole, is smarter than the smartest individual within it. If you attract a dumb crowd, you're not necessarily setting a high bar. And, even with a smart crowd, you get a lot of noise. You need a way to filter out all the noise, you can have just one "editor" do it, but that's not really the best way. When the information you want the crowd to process for you can be broken down completely into mathematics, you're in luck because the noise will simply drop out naturally -- as is the case when you, for instance, have everyone guess the weight of an Ox and then simply average the guesses or when you write a search engine that uses links as "votes". Back in the days when Google was new and link farms didn't exist, it was orders of magnitude more effective at returning relevant results (even if you only got a relevant result say 85% of the time, other serach engines could only deliver them maybe 10-20% of the time) simply because it harnessed the "wisdom" of the crowd. It put every other search engine at the time to absolute shame, and that's why it became dominant practically over night. Clearly there is something there.
On the other hand,when its written text like Slashdot or even Fark comments, then you need a good system in place to do it. Yes, you need something akin to editing, but as Wikipedia and Slashdot show us, you can crowd source the editing as well. When you look at the collected moderated-up analysis on Slashdot on any given article, you end up with content that is overall more thoughtful, comprehensive and thorough than any given individual within the crowd could have produced.
Yes, Slashdot could have a single editor in place moderating all the forums, but that would neither be realistic or as effective. Once again, a crowd can do the job better than an individual.